DOOM III REVIEW

Hell on Mars.

The original DOOM, when released in 1993 on DOS. It started a euphoria that swept PC gaming. First-person shooters, FPS, were still just a twinkle in the gaming industry's eye, and DOOM, while not the first of them, really kicked the genre into high gear. Eleven years later, id has finished developing its remake of the original game, this time with a state-of-the-art graphics engine and a lot of mechanical artwork.

Doom 3 is essentially a remake of the original Doom, though series fans will find re-imagined versions of almost every monster from both Doom and Doom II in the new sequel. You play as a nameless, voiceless 22nd-century space marine called by the Union Aerospace Corporation to its Mars research facility beset with mysterious problems--the forces of hell, to be exact.

You'll end up single-handedly fighting back legions of hell spawn using weapons like shotguns, machine guns, and rocket launchers. As in the classic Doom games, your foes here are liable to strike at any time--often just as you round a corner, grab a much-needed power-up, or set foot into a new area. So, while your enemies will materialize without notice, and may occasionally startle you as they leap out of the darkness.

The fact that the art actually kept getting better than it was at the beginning and the pacing was very good. The action was fairly repetitive and AI was not the most impressive (, but by the end of the game, I just didn't care. I was having a HELL of a time blasting mindless creatures.

Graphics
The environment in which the game takes place is really the high point here, its that good. Not only is the technology that renders everything in the game amazing, even on low settings, but the actual art is beyond good. The design and art team showed us the reason why we wanted to buy DOOM 3.

Everything about DOOM 3 oozes dread. Even if I hadn't known what this game was all about when starting it, I'm pretty sure I would have felt that something was terribly wrong. After the first few emails left in a PDA, that feeling becomes cemented and then it's just a matter of time before the stuff hits the fan.

The choice to make the station on Mars look industrial and depressing was obviously deliberate. This station must have had the highest suicide rate of anywhere in the galaxy. It’s so claustrophobic at times I was actually felt breathing in thick air.

No bright spots cheer the complex web of connecting labs. Tubes, pipes, steam vents, grates, and tons of metal sheeting are the theme. It's oppressive and a testament to the unnatural nature of the events to take place.

The base also has a very worn and lived-in feel that adds to the realism. The fact that anyone could live in such a dark place may be hard to believe, but we're talking about Hell on Mars... this isn't necessarily about believability. It's about being able to put the rules of the world aside and enjoy the show and everything id has done here allows that. The detail in every part of the world lets you do just that.

Everything from the crisp consoles with bleeping lights and touch screen buttons to the short glimpses of the incredibly detailed outside environments that players get to see on a monorail ride for all of 30 seconds creates a siren song of believability. It's near impossible to resist being drawn into the experience.

The final and probably most important piece is the lighting. The mood wouldn't exist without the excellent placement of the various lights in each of the levels. Flickering lights create strange shadows that will make you startle at nothing. And lights actually do flick off and you simply see four glowing sets of eyes hopping towards you in the dark, it just so creepy.

The change of one environment an awesome example of the attention paid to the detail of the game, but the other environments to explore further add to the immersive ness of the title. While you start at the Martian base interior - both "before" and "after" - you also get to explore, albeit briefly, the exterior of the Martian base, watching the red sands kick dust up as you hurry to the nearest airlock without burning up your supply of oxygen. After that, you will also get to explore the depths of Hell.

Music/Sound
While DOOM 3's key focus has been it's graphics since day one, its audio performance is also worth a hearty mention. The ambience created by DOOM 3's powerful audio processing only adds to the game experience the rest of the title delivers on. In addition to this, the game also gives you plenty of quality audio to immerse yourself in.

From your general conversations with fellow Marines to the screams and static blistering over your portable radio when the gates of Hell open - not to mention the sound effects your attackers deliver - you'll quickly discover that DOOM 3 strikes big in the Audio department.

While the quality of the audio is excellent, another thing that deserves mention is the quality of the voice over performance. Every actor is unique to their character and is performed just as you'd expect it. I've yet to encounter someone who sounds as though they're reading their performance off of a sheet of paper, aka Spiderman 2.

Doom 3 has no soundtrack, apart from a heavy metal tune that plays at the title screen and a few rhythmic ambient tracks. This questionable design choice certainly does amplify the game's effective, believable, and often truly creepy ambient sounds, but it also contributes to the game's dearth of true drama and suspense.

You can probably think of many games whose musical compositions and actual musical cues contributed heavily to the atmosphere of the experience; but Doom 3 balked at this opportunity. Some of the actual sound effects in the game also aren't that great.

Your marine's footsteps sound bland and rather loud, and as mentioned, most of the weapons sound disappointingly underpowered. On the other hand, most of the monsters' shrieks and roars are just as menacing as their looks, and the voice acting that can be heard throughout the game is of generally high quality.

Gameplay
There are a few aspects of DOOM 3's gameplay that definitely set it aside from previous id games. The first and most notable is the fact that DOOM 3, unlike it's predecessors, is not a run 'n' gun shooter.

If you don't enter every room or turn every corner with caution, you could easily find yourself snacking on the shotgun pellets of a hellbent Marine or the fireball of a irate Imp - if you're lucky. It's a well-crafted shooter within one of the most real environments there is. Not only is it a combination of graphic quality and audio performance, but the detail in the environments is even more powerful.

Wandering through the stages, you may come across half-eaten burgers, magazines, soda cans, and other signs of a lived-in world surrounding you. Of course, this all changes once the life around you becomes altered.

Over the course of the game, you'll fight your way through a series of linear levels filled with locked doors, and you'll gradually find new weapons and occasionally meet new types of monsters. Early on, your apparent goal is to meet up with your squad, but as you might expect, you'll never actually get to fight alongside any human forces.

Despite the game's cinematic trappings, it follows a formula that generally lacks drama or tension. Occasionally, the game presents to you a shocking or surprising scene--a hallucination or some hellish, otherworldly image.

These moments are effective, but are too few and far between in the context of a single-player shooter that's of above-average length (somewhere between 15 to 20 hours). Fortunately, the campaign definitely picks up during the last several hours, once you finally reach (and keep going past) the point when you confront the enemy on its own turf.

Fundamental Flaws
Since Doom 3 purports to have a plausible premise, suddenly, aspects of the game that you might not normally question will start to stick out as being annoyingly inconsistent. You'll undoubtedly find time to wonder about these logic gaps as you fight throughout the UAC base, especially if you've played other recent first-person shooters that do a better job of justifying their plots.

Why would a 22nd-century space marine be sent into action in a darkly lit area without night vision goggles of some sort, or even a helmet? Why wouldn't any of his weapons have light-amplification modules built into them when even today's weapons frequently do? Why, instead, is he stuck carrying around a very weak flashlight with unlimited battery life? Why is he unable to hold a gun and the flashlight at the same time? Why are the UAC's small, spider like sentry drones so incredibly powerful?

You'll see these helpful little guys rip through droves of hell spawn even faster than you can. If the base's defenses are so tough, then why is everyone so worried, and why is everyone getting killed? Doom 3's central Gameplay conceit simply doesn't fit in with the premise of the game, and this is a problem only because Doom 3 chooses to try to make you feel like you're in a believable, fully realized world.

Doom-inspired shooters, such as Serious Sam and Painkiller, wisely followed the classic game's arcade like nature by never even purporting to be plausible and simply focusing on run-and-gun action. So it's ironic that Doom 3's ambitions to be a story-driven game mostly just end up getting in the way and weakening the overall experience.

However, the constant extremely dark settings conspire with the frequently repetitive level design to contribute to gameplay that can often feel monotonous, especially since the action itself is very straightforward. What's more, the game's levels will occasionally require you to backtrack through dark hallways without clear markings, so rather than constantly blasting monsters, you may end up spending an undue amount of time just trying to get your bearings.

There's a sizable arsenal of weapons to be found here, but none of them are completely satisfying to use. Pretty much all the guns are direct-fire, point-and-shoot weapons with no alternate firing modes and no close-range melee attacks; they do look impressive onscreen, but they all sound surprisingly tinny and subdued, rather than loud and powerful.

Mulitplayer
Most of the multiplayer matches I tried was quite prone to lag, making the game's projectile-based weapons frustrating to use. The multiplayer maps themselves are dimly lit much like the rest of the game, but the lack of lighting isn't really conducive to the relatively faster-paced deathmatch modes; the maps themselves are interesting enough otherwise, and are basically well suited to four-player close-quarters bloodbaths.

Nevertheless, the multiplayer action generally lacks much of the visceral and even the visual thrills of the single-player mode, since players are limited to choosing from four colors of just one generic marine player model.

But if you are looking for a multiplayer experience you will be better off playing Unreal tournament 2004.

Presentation
Two elements of the presentation that I'll also note are the interface controls for accessing doors and terminals and the main menu screen in and of itself. First, the interface controls, aside from being basic single action controls - walk to it, hit the "action" key, door opens - actually involve a little bit of interaction. Each terminal is a monitor which has, for the most part, a virtual program interface.

Move your cursor over the screen and it turns into a mouse pointer, allowing you to click on the proper area of the screen to activate it. While it's simple, I think it's a pretty nice touch. Secondly, the main menu screen itself. The menu screen is very basic in its layout and easy to navigate. Simple and effective. That’s the way interface should be designed.

All four main options are listed on the bottom with the DOOM 3 logo floating in front of a partially visible, slowly rotating render of the red planet itself. It looks nice, fits the rest of the game, and is simple yet easy to use.

Final Verdict
This is a fun, immersive title that pays for itself with it's first play through. Gamers like me who have been playing id games since Wolfenstein will definitely be surprised and pleased with the quality of presentation.

It's a visceral experience all the way through and one of the best FPSs I have ever played. It's far from perfect. Regardless, it's a worthy purchase, even though I'm sure if you're reading this you've already picked up a copy, or at least ordered it. So, be happy with your purchase, it's a great game, even if it is a little more out of your pocket than normal.

Doom 3 is quite possibly the best-looking game ever, thanks to the brand-new 3D graphics engine used to generate its convincingly lifelike, densely atmospheric, and surprisingly expansive environments.

At the same time, when you look past the spectacular appearance, you'll find a conventional, derivative shooter. In fact, if you played the original Doom or its sequel back in the mid '90s (or any popular '90s-era shooter, for that matter), you may be shocked by how similarly Doom 3 plays to those games.

The legions of id Software's true believers will celebrate this straightforwardness as being deliberately "old school," especially since Doom 3 is packed with direct references to its classic predecessors.

However, the truth of the matter is that Doom 3's Gameplay structure and level design are behind the times and very much at odds with the game's cutting-edge, ultra realistic looks. Yet the quality of the presentation truly is remarkable--enough so that it overwhelms Doom 3's occasional problems.

Well there you have it, my Doom 3 review. Though the review is far from perfection I hope you enjoy reading it. In the end it’s only a game. An extremely well made game.

So till my next post ya, its bye from Ganz.

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